Cornell Wright, CTO and co-founder of TerrAvion, checks in with Chris Dombrowski at their offices in Dublin, Calif., on Friday, August 8, 2014. TerrAvion provides winery owners with state of the art aerial imagery.

Photo: Sarah Rice / Special To The Chronicle

Cornell Wright, CTO and co-founder of TerrAvion, checks in with...

Image 2 of 3

Cornell Wright, CTO and co-founder of TerrAvion, a company that provides winery owners with state of the art aerial imagery, at their offices in Dublin, Calif., on Friday, August 8, 2014.

The battlefields of Afghanistan aren’t the most likely starting point for a business related to winemaking.

But that’s exactly where the germ of the idea came from for TerrAvion, the Livermore-founded company that provides aerial imagery to help farmers and wine growers monitor their crops.

Co-founder Robert Morris was a platoon leader for the U.S. Army’s first-ever unmanned aerial systems platoon, flying drones to help support combat missions in the Afghan mountains.

“When I was in Afghanistan in 2006, I remember the first thing someone told me was to take my toy plane home and do something useful,” Morris recalls. “By the end, there were a ton of commanders who would not move their forces without some sort of overhead cover, just to make sure whether the road was open or not.”

Aerial imagery

Recognizing the potential civilian value of drones and aerial imagery, Morris cashed in his G.I. Bill for a business master’s degree at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. That’s where he met Cornell Wright, his tech-savvy company co-founder who was managing the university’s biorobotics lab. Both were interested in starting their own business, and after considering, then discarding, several crazier schemes, they stumbled onto the idea for TerrAvion.

“Robert was out in California doing an internship,” Wright says, “and the thing about saying that he flew drones in the Army is that all of his friends will tell him whatever drone idea they have, good or bad. So he had a friend who grows grapes up in Napa and he said, 'Oh, I really want a drone that can just fly over the vineyard and take NDVI ,’ which is an index of vegetation vigor. That’s when we started talking to growers and researching it and realized that there was definitely a real information problem there.”

The two got to work. It turned out that their aerial technology was easier to deploy simply using a piloted plane, instead of a drone, which led them to Livermore. In addition to being centrally located between wine- and crop-growing regions in the Central Valley and Bay Area, as well as the tech talent and capital of Silicon Valley, the Tri-Valley city is home to the Livermore airport, out of which TerrAvion could fly camera-equipped planes.

Started locally

They ended up launching the company in early 2013 in i-Gate, a Silicon Valley-style startup incubator recently founded in Livermore. The company initially focused locally, pitching members of the Livermore Valley Winegrowers’ Association. It now has 10 employees, has moved into larger headquarters in Dublin and has more than 100 clients, among them prestigious wineries such as Francis Ford Coppola and Wente Vineyards.

That doesn’t come as a surprise to i-Gate’s Brandon Cardwell, who said it was clear from the start that the two founders had a great concept in TerrAvion. And they had the right attitudes and skills to turn that concept into a thriving company.

“There’s an expression in the investor world that what makes for the best startup is you need a hacker and a hustler, ” Cardwell says. “And those guys are just lights out.

“Cornell covers the tech, and Robert is a hustler in the best sense of the word. They have a willingness to go out and get the resources they need. I heard Robert say to one investor during an interview that they don’t have enough money to hire mediocre people and underpay them, and that’s the right mentality for success.”

Product first

Still, the most important factor in the company’s growth has been the product. Previously, most wineries, if they used aerial NDVI imagery at all, only had access to it once a year. And it was expensive.

For roughly the same price, TerrAvion provides image data on a weekly basis, and that data is analyzed and presented in a digestible format — extremely useful for grape growers and viticulturists, many of whom are managing huge swaths of vineyards located all across Northern California.

“Before, we would basically get one overhead NDVI image and make grand assumptions for the entire growing season, the pruning thereafter and the following season’s irrigation and plant nutrition management, based on this one picture. Now we get one every single week of the growing season.

“It’s really changed how we approach our decision making because now we’re able to do something in a vineyard, whether it’s in regards to irrigation or fertilization or canopy management, and be able to see the results the next week. That was huge. It’s been absolutely life changing.”

Management tool

Currently, Ford Coppola uses TerrAvion only for its 60 acres of estate vineyards. But the winery works with some 250 wine growers throughout California, and Asimont is hopeful that the technology will be picked up by more of them as a vineyard management tool. It’s something she says is long overdue within the industry.

“Wine is a luxury product, but we’re still agriculture,” she says. “And if you look at the rest of agriculture, the level of precision farming that they exercise is just awe-inspiring — they can GPS a weed and the tractor can go right to it the next day, that kind of thing. Whereas with viticulture and wine grape vineyards, it’s still seen more like this artsy-fartsy craft, which is really frustrating.”

TerrAvion could be reversing that perception. Wright says the company is growing at the rate of 30 percent per month as they continue to snap up new agricultural clients, the majority of them wineries. They’re also eyeing expanding their service to Southern California, and even as far afield as South America.

Still, Morris and Wright are keeping their contribution in perspective.

“I don’t know how they were making wine 1,000 years ago, but it’s definitely an entirely different industry now,” Wright says. “So we just see this as one step in what’s been quite a long process of winemaking.”

Ethan Fletcher is a Bay Area freelance writer and a contributer to InsideScoopSF.com.